After my week and a bit immersed in Paul Auster, time to get back to normal, with a pair of reviews for you .
The Killings at Kingfisher Hill by Sophie Hannah
This was our book group choice for Jan into Feb which we discussed last week. We were up to ‘K’ in our ‘flora and fauna’ choices.
Sophie Hannah, whose ‘Spilling’ sequence of crime novels I’ve enjoyed very much, (my review of the 6th one here) has, since 2014 been the official continuing author for the Agatha Christie estate on a series of novels featuring Hercule Poirot. The Killings at Kingfisher Hill is the 4th published in 2020, but they’re all standalone mysteries.
It’s Feb 1931. Inspector Edward Catchpool is the narrator of the novel, and at the beginning, he and Poirot, are waiting at Victoria for the motor-coach that will take them and 29 others to the exclusive Kingfisher Hill estate in leafy Surrey. Poirot explains to Catchpool that they have been summoned by Richard Devonport to look into the recent death of his brother Frank at the family mansion on the estate, but that Richard’s father mustn’t know that, they will play the role of devotees of the new board game developed by Devonport pere and his business partner, ‘Peepers’. It is hope that it’ll rival ‘The Landlord Game’ – the original title of Monopoly.
The journey is rather eventful. Poirot has to swap seats with a young lady who becomes distressed, and ends up sitting next to a wickedly acerbic woman who claims to be a murderer. She is later identified as Daisy, Richard and the late Frank’s sister. Did she kill Frank? Now Frank is the black sheep of the family for convoluted reasons I won’t go into, and his visit home was to have been a reconciliation with his parents. However, he brought a guest with him – the person they currently have banged up for the murder! For Frank fell foul of Sidney and Jessica Devonport’s…
…strict Devonport policy: no guests or callers, ever, unless they have been invited or approved by Sidney himself.
Helen Acton, Frank’s fiancee, who dearly loved him, is set to hang in a couple of week’s time, hence Richard contacting Poirot. There will be another murder before long, and Poirot and Catchpool will be thrown out by Sidney when their real purpose is revealed, Sidney calling Catchpool Poirot’s ‘epicene lickspittle’! That turn of phrase was the only thing I loved about this book. The rest was OK, eminently readable, but oh so convoluted. And the characters are all ghastly. Catchpool isn’t a patch on Hastings, Christie’s Poirot sidekick and Poirot himself was even more pompous than usual. The rest of our book group felt the same way, agreeing that Christie is an impossible act to follow, let alone imitate (in the best sense of the word), maybe emulate would be better. Several of us would recommend her darker and contemporary ‘Spilling’ series though.
Source: Own copy. HarperCollins paperback 2021, 352 pages. BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)
The Proof of My Innocence by Jonathan Coe
As a huge fan of Coe’s, I was meant to review this for Shiny New Books, but when it came to it, I found myself strangely devoid of much to say about it, apart from how much I enjoyed it, and how much I laughed when I got the title (I won’t explain, it’d spoil the fun). It’s a typical Coe novel in many respects, a biting satire couched in cosy prose that gently percolates as you read it and gets you later as you ponder the state of the nation portrayed within its pages. But Coe has also had some fun with this one, by experimenting with genre, and things are thus a little different.
In a prologue to the prologue – a prelogue? – we meet a lady detective on her way by train to the Cotswolds, who is finding it impossible to think due to the announcements about suspicious things on the train with the catchphrase ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ This will become a kind of mantra through the book.
Onto the prologue itself and we meet Phyl, who has had a run-in with a bloke about the lift buttons in Heathrow’s Terminal 5 where she works. Home, her mother tells her they’ll have house-guests, old family friend Christopher Swann and his adopted daughter Rashida. Phyl is slightly put out, but she instantly bonds with Rashida when the latter tells about her lifts experience at Heathrow. Phyll doesn’t intend to be working in a sushi bar for long, she wants to be an author but can’t decide which genre to sit her novel-to-be in. She has a shortlist of three:
- Cosy Crime
- Dark Academia
- Autofiction
These three genres will become the style for the main three parts of the novel to follow.
Part 1: ‘See it’ – Set during the few days that Liz Truss is PM and the Queue to see the Queen lying in state in London, sees a cosy crime being committed in the Cotswolds when Christopher Swann, a left-winger and government critic and blogger, attend a right-wing conference at a country house, ending up murdered. There is a funny scene earlier in the night of the murder where Christopher is talking to a sloshed professor who was meant to be giving the conference’s keynote speech…
Richard complained to him about the difficulties of being a conservative thinker in the current academic climate. ‘Scruton got it tight, you know,’ he slurred. ‘Slodger Cruton. I mean, Roger Scruton. He said that conservative academics . . . we were like homosexuals in Proust. We don’t dare to annouce ourselves, so we have to recognise each other by certain signs. Secret signs. Have you read him, by any chance? Not Proust. Scrodger Luton, I mean Lodger Scrotom. Brilliant man, Absolutely brilliant.
Part 2: ‘Say it’ – takes the form of a Dark Academia story, set initially during the Cambridge days of Peter Cockerill, an author, who was the subject of a keynote speech at the conference in part 1.
Part 3: ‘Sorted’ – Rashida and Phyl take over the novel to tell the story of how they, alongside Inspector DI Prudence Freeborne, investigate the murder of Christopher and search for a missing book which pull all the pieces together in the Epilogue.
You can tell that Coe was having great fun trying out these forms – and he does it really well, while continuing to skewer those he is ideologically opposed to (like Scruton!). DI Freeborne is a splendid creation in particular, a bon viveur and detective very much in the mould of Poirot, but in the body of a younger Miss Marple, (I imagined Olivia Colman playing the part!).
While not my favourite of Coe’s books (one day I’ll rank them perhaps), I very much enjoyed his excursion into genre writing. It’ll be interesting to see what he does next, for whatever it is, I’ll be reading it.
Source: Review copy – thank you! Penguin Viking hardback, 2024, BUY at Blackwell’s via my affiliate link (free UK P&P)
